“The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him…
The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself… All progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw
After five years of writing, this is my last article in this column. When I started writing in 2008 I just wanted to vent about a country I was struggling to understand. Like not being able to choose our parents and our siblings…I had no say in being born a Nigerian. But I liked to believe that my life should matter and how better to achieve this than contribute to my society in any way that I could. I still believe this.
The more I wrote, the more I learned and gradually, my articles moved from merely pointing out the problems, to identifying solutions and then to implementation and the challenges of implementing. Until I started writing, I never considered working in or for government in any capacity nor did I fully appreciate the role of civil society and the development agencies. But as the tone and focus of my articles changed, so did my thinking and my understanding about the one question which has plagued me from the time I could make a distinction between what is and what ought to be: what is wrong with Nigeria?
There are many things wrong with Nigeria: corruption and impunity, dearth of leadership, erosion of values, the worship money for values…the list will go on and the rankings will differ depending on who you speak to but is that what is ‘really wrong with Nigeria? Other countries have corruption, how do they deal with it? We pride ourselves on our traditional values, yet our freedoms from oppression are weak and our care of members of society who need our protection most is terrible.
There is a saying that writers write about what they want to understand. This sums up my experience, and while there is room for improvement, I have condensed what is wrong with us into three. The first is the belief that “Nigerians deserve the leaders they have.” This is a commonly uttered statement usually voiced in exasperation when discussing the many ways in which Nigeria and the political system continues to disappoint us. It is an easy way to absolve us of responsibility. The implication is that until people change themselves, they will not be able to throw up better leaders. I do not agree. I think people in leadership positions; whether they get there by accident, fake humility or design have a greater responsibility than the rest of us.
Yes, it is painful that people sell their votes and can’t grasp that holding government accountable is the citizens’ responsibility. It is annoying that Nigerians cannot see that the deep mistrust they have of each other is a vicious circle which permeates every interaction. It is frustrating that we do not see that by focusing on ethnic and religious representation in every naturally conceivable and manufactured way we ensure mediocrity in our public and private sectors and it is disheartening that we seem not to understand that caring for and being considerate of our neighbors is tantamount to caring for ourselves.
For me, this is where true leadership comes in and can make the difference. Leaders are not those who know everything or have the loudest voice, they are people with vision – who can see the future, the Promised Land. They successfully get people to adopt this dream as their own and convince enough people to trust that they know what needs to be done to get there. What leaders don’t do is pander to the most basic insecurities of humans and use it as an excuse not to do their jobs.
Nigeria has rarely, if ever, had such leaders in positions of authority where it really matters. Instead, we have a group of men who mask their self-interest with ethnic and religious dogma. They have been in government or involved in government over the last 50 years and are grooming their successors to pick up the baton when it drops from their dead aged fingers.
This brings us to else is wrong: that we do not know our history and we refuse to be guided by or learn from it. Appreciation of history would tell us that we can’t say we deserve the leaders we have because the same handful of people, give or take a few new disciples have been in control since independence – there has been no opportunity to change them. Nigerians who refuse to vote or sell their votes have never been proved wrong: that the difference between one politician and another is typically the difference between half a dozen and six. If we studied history we would realize that little has changed in the way our local governments have been mismanaged since the 60s- even when we operated regions instead of states. History would also help us realize that the census has always been a tool for rigging elections and that the party in control at the center always merges with the state agencies such as the army, police and electoral commission.
And finally, what is wrong with Nigeria is that as pointed out in the quote above by Shaw, we are all so reasonable about the madness in which we live in. We despise and mock those who try to point out that things are wrong – we call them unreasonable, unrealistic, idealists who ‘don’t know Nigeria’.
After five years of writing, I know that the change we want is not going to come from the bottom. It is going to have to come from the middle and the top. The current system is designed to keep the majority of Nigeria’s 160 million uneducated, impoverished and too distracted with sideshows to push for meaningful change and so waiting for them is waiting in vain.
As I take time off writing to reflect on what I have learnt and what I am still learning, I want to close with something I think is a guide for building a better Nigeria and protecting oneself from harm. Doing good for the sake of doing the right thing is the most powerful talisman ever and there are many quotes which say this much more eloquently than I ever can. By being nice to people, even those you do not know, you ensure that niceness will follow you and by doing the right thing, even if it is painful or more troublesome to do so, you join the forces of the universe to make things align for the good of all human kind. In other words, pay goodness forward, for the sake of children everywhere and your children will benefit.
As we prepare for 2014 and all that it will bring, remember, one person can make a difference and many are doing so devotedly in various parts of the public, private and civil society. However, we need a critical mass in the places that matter most: the highest executive, legislative and judicial offices. Thank you Reader for years of encouragement; constructive criticism; and outright disagreements with me, I have appreciated your good company with me on this journey. You are privileged; the one, maybe at most three percent who can read and has regular access to newspapers and the Internet… Nigeria needs you. Do good for her.
Happy New Year and all the best in 2014.
